Mass Relevance gets $2M for social marketing

Social marketing company founded by former Dell executive Sam Decker funded by Mike Maples

Mass Relevance, a social marketing company that just launched, announced Tuesday that it has secured nearly $2 million from the Floodgate Fund (formerly Maples Investments) and Austin Ventures in a Series A round. Apparently social marketing is such a hot space, the startup is leaving the “highly competitive round” open for any other angel investors that want to get a piece of the pie.

As part of the deal, Floodgate’s Mike Maples, Jr. will take a seat on the Mass Relevance board.

CEO Sam Decker, a former Dell executive and founding CMO of Bazaarvoice, is joined by co-founders Brian Dainton and Eric Falcao in founding Mass Relevance, which will be a platform for brands like Best Buy, Macy’s and Dell to manage the content they share on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

“Curation is a concept whose time has come and this team has the technology and vision to lead in this space and drive real business results,” said Maples.

In anticipation of today’s announcement, Decker posted an analysis of the new marketing climate on his site, Decker Marketing.

“The capability to find, curate and display relevant social content will become a competitive advantage for brands, media and retailers who want to attract an audience,” writes Decker. “If you miss out, the alternative is that the masses will turn elsewhere to find relevant content.”

He goes on to describe three rising movements that signal where the market is going:

Content production via social mediums already exceeds the audience’s ability to consume said content.

“These movements are interoperable, like gears, where networks and crowdsourcing produce real-time content, which drives the need for curation & display.”

Decker isn’t the first to realize all of this, of course. Social marketing and social customer relationship management (CRM) have increasingly become buzz phrases in tech, as businesses and brands realize en masse that sites like Facebook and Twitter aren’t just toys for teens.

Other social marketing companies we’ve featured before and worth checking out are Extole and Shoutlet, both institutionally-funded startups focused on social CRM.